The emergency RHS plans protecting its gardens from threat of water droughts: ‘Adapting to the new normal’

The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has announced emergency measures to safeguard its gardens from the escalating threat of water shortages.

The environmental charity, which manages five prominent public gardens across England, confirmed on Saturday that it will prioritise investment in water capture and management projects throughout 2026, a direct response to last year's severe droughts.

Amid increasingly erratic weather patterns, the RHS is also encouraging home gardeners to adopt similar preparatory measures this winter and spring, maximising rainwater capture.

These include soil preparation techniques such as hollow tining, chop-and-drop, and mulching, alongside creating rain gardens, installing rainwater storage, and carefully considering plant placement.

This initiative comes as global warming continues to fuel volatility within the global water cycle, leading to more frequent years of below-average rainfall and an increased risk of flooding across the UK.

Last year witnessed the driest spring in 132 years and the hottest summer on record, pushing several regions of the country into drought conditions, some of which were still recovering as late as January.

In anticipation of future dry spells, the RHS is now reviewing water allocation strategies across its renowned gardens: Wisley in Surrey, Hyde Hall in Essex, Rosemoor in Devon, Harlow Carr in North Yorkshire, and Bridgewater in Greater Manchester.

Projects in 2026 will include increasing the storage of water in tanks and lakes, installing ebb and flow benches in its retail centres to reduce water use, and investing in rain garden installations.

The charity will also carry out research on soil health in its gardens as well as continue quantifying individual plant and whole landscape water use.

In addition, it will explore using more grey-water – cleaner wastewater from baths, showers, sinks and washing machines.

The plans mark a wider shift in the organisation’s approach to climate change as it increasingly focuses on adapting to the growing impacts over mitigating the rise in planet-warming emissions in the atmosphere.

Tim Upson, RHS director of horticulture, said: “Water is the lifeblood of any garden – important not only to human health and wellbeing but the broader environment and wildlife – and we, like the UK’s 34 million gardeners, are having to adapt to the new normal; prioritising collection, storage and management of rainwater as well as relocating and reassessing our collections to future-proof them.”

Mr Upson said the charity’s updated water management plan “gets into the nitty-gritty” of where a last bucket of water might be used in each garden.

“That’s the reality of the situation that we need to prepare for and we would be foolish not to,” he said.

To understand what grows in its own gardens and advise British gardeners, the RHS is also recording the water use of different garden landscapes, such as trees, herbaceous perennial borders, fine turf lawns, and vegetable gardens.

The charity said it is using this knowledge to predict future water use patterns by these plants and prepare for future planting and water resources management as climate change accelerates.

“There’s a sweet spot between building plants’ resilience to withstand drier periods by providing less water but then there’s the potential of stressing a plant and leaving them susceptible to plant health issues, not to mention reduced floriferousness, which has a knock-on effect for wildlife and humans,” Mr Upson added.